Note: Discussions of death, suicide, and abuse.
Recently, on a midnight scroll, I stumbled upon this old thread that asked: “What disturbing fact came to light about a family member after they passed away?”
From long-kept family secrets to disturbing discoveries to heartbreaking realizations, here’s what everyone shared:
1. “That my uncle passed from AIDS and not cancer like he said. Turned out he had been sick for a really long time. Gutted he never felt like he could share with us and went through it alone.”
2. “My great-grandfather had another family that wasn’t revealed until after he passed in his late 90s. He lived ’til I was in my mid-20s, and not once would I have ever suspected it. He was present at every family party, took me for haircuts once a month, and cut their lawn every week. It turned out my great-grandmother knew but hid it from everyone in the family. She actually knew his other kids and families. She told my dad while in hospice.”
“The real kicker was one time when I was doing a family tree on one of those [ancestry] sites, it kept suggesting a public family tree I did not recognize. Turns out it was his other family.”
3. “My grandfather always kept the door of his home office locked. When he died in 1987, my grandmother just left the door closed and locked and eventually misplaced the key altogether. When she moved into assisted living last year, my mom and I cleaned out her house. I live closest, so it was on me to wait for the locksmith to come and open the office door. The room was like a time capsule, complete with Winston cigarettes still on the desk, butts in the ashtray, bills, and a newspaper from 1987 stacked neatly. And the office was filled with photographs. My grandfather was a photographer, so this was no surprise. Mostly, they were from his job, family, the house, vacations, etc. But then I found a locked file cabinet drawer and got curious/suspicious.”
4. “In 2009, I got a Facebook message from a guy saying, essentially, ‘Hi, I think we have the same dad.’ My dad died in 2004. I knew my dad had been married way before he met my mom, but none of us knew he had a son that he abandoned. When the baby was 6 months old, he left to join the army, never seeing his son again. So I have a half-brother about 20 years older than me.”
“Since I was the first to find out, I was tasked with telling my mother. I called her up, and she basically said, ‘Meh, your dad was bound to have some more skeletons in the closet that we didn’t yet know about.’ The whole thing makes me incredibly sad when I think about it. Sad for this guy who didn’t have a dad (he had been looking for him on and off since he was 17). But also sad for my dad that he carried this secret with him for so long and died without ever having told anyone. It must have haunted him.”
5. “Well, this is not so much disturbing as it is awesome. My grandfather kept a big safe in the basement of his house. About six months after his death, we bought a diamond blade saw to get it open as we had no idea where the key was.”
6. “My grandfather, who we called Opa, was a carpenter his entire life. He built half the houses in my hometown and loved to give them away AT COST to young couples getting a start in life. When my grandmother passed, Opa began building his own coffin, and it was beautiful. He asked my mom to put in nice red satin upholstery, and when it was finished, he stood it up at his 90th birthday party and asked us all to pose with him in it.”
“We’d always known he served in WWII, but like many men, he never talked about it. We learned after his passing that he’d signed up when circumcision was still required, and he volunteered for the procedure so he could go fight. Once enlisted, they put his carpentry skills to use building bridges, but for the most part, he spent his time making coffins to send boys home.”
Here’s some photos of Opa 🥹 (and his coffin), provided by the original poster.
7. “That my dad had been recording and listening to all our phone calls. For years. We found boxes of cassette tapes he had hidden in his shop after he died.”
8. “Disturbing only because it was sad. We found evidence that a beloved uncle was closeted gay. We discovered this while clearing out his home after his funeral. This was in the ’80s, so at no point in his life would coming out have been easy.”
9. “Not necessarily disturbing, but my grandfather knew he had cancer six months before he passed away. Even when his health declined rapidly in the last two weeks, he never said anything about it. I kind of knew that was going on. He’s too stubborn to let his family take care of him or be bedridden.”
10. “Uncle died from auto-erotic asphyxiation. So it came out that he was into auto-erotic asphyxiation.”
11. “My great-grandma saved $13 million over her lifetime. It all went to my grandpa. He remarried a nutjob. He got lymphoma and died five years after the diagnosis. The day he died, his wife took their picture off the wall when they declared him dead. After the funeral, she got in his truck, and we never saw her again…”
12. “After my baby brother died, as big bro, I seized every piece of technology he had. My mom wanted his phone, so I sanitized the fuck out of it. After I broke into his laptop and started cleaning it up and organizing it, I found several documents on there and found that he posted to several sites talking about how lonely and depressed he was. He spoke about how our mom’s new husband had made his life hell and how it was fucked up that she repeatedly let him come back into her life after causing a lot of family drama. He also talked about how close he and I were and how he hoped to make me proud one day (I was always proud of him).”
“He talked a lot about my daughter – his niece — and how I was being the daddy she deserved and how proud he was of me. He wished that he and I had a dad like me when we were growing up. Instead, he had me. I did what I could. I was only eight years older and a child raising a child. He missed our dad a lot because he had finally started to change after years of abuse, but then he died. He also talked of all the times he thought about suicide and how he came close to doing it but never did follow through. I miss my brother so much.”
13. “Not necessarily disturbing, but surprising. My dad did one of those genealogy DNA things and found out that my grandfather was not actually his father. It appears that both my grandparents had multiple affairs, and my father was the product of one. They stayed married to each other for more than 50 years, though.”
14. “I only found out a couple of years ago that my grandmother’s sister hadn’t just passed away at a young age; the Argentine military junta had kidnapped her. She was either tortured to death in prison, shot by firing squad into a mass grave, or drugged and dropped from an airplane… the possibilities are horrifying.”
15. “That my godfather was abusive to his wife and had tried to strangle her once. We didn’t find this out until years after he died, until his daughter finally snapped after hearing for the hundredth time what a great guy he was.”
16. “Shortly after my great uncle died, who had no wife or children, my mother found some of his military records dating back from WW2. Turns out he was captured, sent to a prisoner-of-war camp, and worked on the Burma-Thailand railway.”
17. “My grandfather’s brother, on his deathbed, told his entire family that during World War II, he had an affair and a second family. This included an illegitimate daughter. Right before he passed, he told them not to worry as she had been paid out of the will and any inheritance.”
18. “That my mom had given birth to twin boys while in college, long before meeting my dad. The father was a professor in her department. She went away for nine months without telling her family, saying she was taking a class for her major. However, she was not keeping in touch, and her family grew increasingly suspicious. Eventually, her sister came up unannounced. She knocked, and my mom answered, obviously pregnant.”
“The sister went back and let the family know what she had seen. My mom had the babies, put them up for adoption, and returned home to an icy, silent reception. The reason for her absence was never spoken of. I didn’t find out until many years after her death.”
And lastly…
19. “About 20 years ago, I had a boyfriend who got cancer and died within a year. As he got sicker, I began to realize that all the stuff he had told me about his family was made up, and all of the truth came out afterward. He didn’t have a twin brother who trained dolphins at SeaWorld; he had a regular upbringing in the USA, not Morocco, and his parents were normal, boring people from Michigan, not an actress and a professor from Paris. Even his first name was invented; he was actually named Steve.”
“There was one true thing: his cousin who worked at NASA really did. I guess that was already interesting enough that he didn’t have to make that up. As to why he did this, it was never clear. He didn’t lie about other stuff, as far as I know. His real family was on the other side of the country and didn’t want to visit while he was sick and didn’t come to the funeral either. The whole thing was sad and strange.”
Have you ever uncovered a startling secret about a loved one after their death? Let us know in the comments.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger as a result of domestic violence, call 911. For anonymous, confidential help, you can call the 24/7 National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 (SAFE) or chat with an advocate via the website.
